At the beginning of Return of the Jedi, it’s like Luke Skywalker’s gone mad. He’s swinging that lightsaber around left and right, slicing here, dicing there–he’s killing up a storm with that thing!

Jabba’s friends and employees have no chance because–finally–Luke is a man!

He started out with a whiny voice, a need to get power converters at Tosche station, and absolutely no lightsaber. My how things change during the course of a trilogy.

A little practice with the lightsaber changes Luke into a Jedi Knight! And boy, look at him use that thing. He’s an absolute master with it. Truly, it’s a pleasure to behold.

Then he hangs out with Yoda, who tells him pretty plainly that to be a real man, he has to face Vader. But…Vader has a lightsaber, too! This sets up the climactic confrontation to come. A battle of sabers. It couldn’t end any better.

After chatting with Yoda, Luke camps out with his friends and some teddy bears, but doesn’t really enjoy himself too much because there aren’t as many occasions to whip out his tool. So he takes off to confront Vader and before you know it, the two are swinging their lightsabers at each other in a holy galactic confrontation of masculinity!

And then, as Luke finally succeeds in smashing his lightsaber down on Vader repeatedly, he realizes that the victory is not making him feel like a man. In fact, it’s making him feel like a terrible machine.

This leads Luke toward his dramatic moment of truth. He IS a man, he decides, but it has nothing to do with having a lightsaber. He tosses his instrument away. He doesn’t need it anymore. True masculinity doesn’t come from a device, no matter how long or exciting.

He turns to face the Emperor–without any artifice. He is a real man, now!

And as the Emperor squirts out streams of energy from his bare fingers, Luke’s new realization is confirmed. Even the Emperor could care less about having a long one.

As Luke Skywalker writhes in agony, he is comforted by the fact that now he knows the true source of masculinity. It comes from within.

AARON DIETZ is the author of Super, a novel from Emergency Press about commitment, crisis, paperwork, and heartbreak. Dietz's super powers include a high metabolism and the ability to put things back where he got them. He's also pretty good at math.
As an instructional designer, Dietz has written online high school courses on computer programming, green design, and 3-D video game creation. It’s natural for him to write quizzes. He’s worked a decade in libraries. He’s also been paid to count traffic and once failed a personality test.
Dietz writes for TheNervousBreakdown.com, blogs at aarondietz.us, and is an advisory editor of KNOCK Magazine.

SO whiny. But hey–opportunities are probably not very big in Tatooine. I mean, he was only even a moisture farmer because of relation. Wow, what a place. I think an internship at Watto’s would be like gold, there.

“To a TRUE Jedi, size doesn’t matter.” Excellent point, Aaron…..but it might be hard (oops) to remember when the TRUE and not so big-light-sabred Jedi is up against (oops, once more) a larger-sabred fake Jedi.

You know, I thought they were cute like everybody else (in my defense, I was 9 when I first saw the movie), but when I heard George Lucas had intended the planet to be a Wookie planet, I was a little sad. It would have been a lot of fun to put Han and Leia with a whole planet of Wookies.

I still can figure out how a civilization that’s technologically still in the stone age has managed to figure how to build seige enginees (for use against what, exactly?) and harnessed the principles of flight.

Yes, I am talking about the damned Ewoks. Bones, stones, and sticks constitute the pinnacle of their technology. So why do they have middle-ages level engineering skills? Why would they need siege engines to go to war against another Ewok tribe, when they all live in non-fortified tree huts?

Also, from a biological perspective, the Ewok body type is completely wrong for an arboreal lifestyle.

Those are excellent points. Maybe they had done a little fighting with the Empire before? Perhaps the Ewoks were merely on a reservation chosen for them by the Empire, and their real home is some other planet, where they have an excellent engineering university? This is sounding REALLY plausible…(not)….

I was thinking about this, Greg, as I read this fantastic post. The X-wing fighter (the pointed end of it, anyway) is the phallus and then he shoots two red photon torpedoes or whatever into the hole to blow the thing up.

I’m convinced Luke metaphorically lost his virginity on that first Death Star run. That scene in which he fires the proton torpedo into the porthole leading to the reactor in SW IV is accompanied by an orgasmic grunt so sexual I always consider forwarding past it when the kids are watching.

Fun read! I lurrrrv all things Star Wars. In fact, this is what I’ve subjected my children to in the name of Star Wars: http://twitpic.com/ste38

Probably to try and recreate the paternity revelations in Empire. You’d have thought that if Vader was going to reveal to Luke that he was his father then he’d add that the mouthy lass he was involved with was his sister…